


Lives That Once Were Mine

by Ffwydriad



Category: Loki: Agent of Asgard, Norse Religion & Lore, Thor (Comics)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Moral Ambiguity, Ragnarok, Reincarnation, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 08:46:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13567005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ffwydriad/pseuds/Ffwydriad
Summary: Each Ragnarok, the world dies, and is reborn, the same stories retold, again and again, almost always the same.Here, in fragments, she tries to find herself.





	Lives That Once Were Mine

There is very little more dangerous than scrying the fates of yous who used to be. An eternity of lifelines, all the same, and all different. It is the most dangerous dream, to be lost in them, and those who manage to awaken often find themselves uncertain which past came about this cycle, which truth is theirs to bear.

She doesn't scry. The past is past, the present present, only the future matters. But it is tempting, to learn what plans have worked and what have failed, and several times she has started the ritual, never bringing it to its fated close. Perhaps that is why her dreams go there, not remembered but long lingering. A touch of lives that used to be, diving deep in to her soul.

It is the end of everything, Ragnarok once more, and if she were not fighting, perhaps she would be searching for the stories that she can't remember.

* * *

The first Ragnarok hits the hardest, but every Ragnarok is the first, for those trapped in a cycle can not see its beginning or its end. 

She sits in the world tree, apple in hand, and looks down as the world burns, as the tree burns, as everything that can be and shall be burns up in the fires of death. An apple falls, in to her hand, and she finds it rotting, before it even leaves the tree.

You'd think, with the battle so far away, that you would be spared from the bloodshed. But in Ragnarok, all gods die, even those who hide themselves away.

* * *

What place this is, she can not say. It is a Loki-scheme, undoubtedly, the signature unmistakable across the very world. She can see the trickster, walking away, from a battle field, and she wonders how much of this is plan and how much happenstance. 

It isn't the death she was expecting, last-stand by Odin, facing the hordes of death itself.

The world is not their Asgard, but it is Asgard all the same, the nine realms as they never were, as they had always been, brought back from the destruction of the universe. The Midgard is different, and it is not hard to see this world is not the one they came from, however much it may belong to them now.

"What have you done?" she asks, as Loki turns to leave, as Loki always turns. It is not the Loki she knows, for that god is dead now, a hundred times, but it is Loki all the same.

"I told a story," Loki tells her, and grins, "around a campfire, and placed a stolen legend in to the minds of a world that needed one."

"What have you done?" she asks again, as if there are any more answers to give.

Loki laughs at that, and it is so different from most Loki laughs, and yet it reverberates in her heart as something familiar. "I broke the chain of events. I saved Asgard, once and for all."

* * *

Ragnarok is rarely the most interesting thing to scry, but it is the easiest, the death of all things, crystalized. It has the story of all Asgard, in a single scene, all of the players defined by their demise.

Somehow, that doesn't seem to be her role in this at all. For however many parts she plays in it, Ragnarok never strikes her as her story, not at all.

* * *

"Do you ever feel," Amora asks, of open air where she knows her oldest friend and longest enemy will be listening, "as if some kinder destiny has been stolen from you?"

"Never," Loki says, and sits like a whisper on the wind. "My fate was always the deceiver, the betrayer, Loki Lie-smith. I forged the change myself."

"And if we still had Ragnarok," she follows, thinking up the question as she says it, "do you think that change would stick?"

"Undoubtedly, I crafted it too well." A head tilt, an inscrutable smile. "Do you feel a change of heart, Enchantress?"

"I feel like Asgard was my home, once."

"Asgard is your home, more than it is mine, even now when I am welcomed with opened arms."

"Asgard is a place I live," she corrects, looking at the stars, different yet the same. "I don't think it was ever truly my home."

* * *

Lying in ice, in her cruel cage, she feels she should dream of Asgard, of warm hall and wood and all the gods who there she knows. Instead, she dreams of Vanaheim, of the fields of her childhood, of grass and wheat and summer wind, all the things absent here.

Her heart begins to freeze, each passing day, and on most, she cannot bear to even move.

A chain, a hand, a flutter of falcon wings, and she is free. Fingers intwined, and she can not care, as she is brought forth, in to the light, in to fresh air.

Asgard, she finds, is as much as prison as all of Jotunheim. For so long she thought it her home, and now, she can not bear the thought.

* * *

"I think," the god of stories says, "it is better to be the witch than the princess, in the end, for a witch has agency and personhood, however doomed they may be, and the princess is nothing but an object."

“Is it really worth it, to give up all sense of a happy ending, for the illusion of free will?”

“Is it?” Loki asks her, eyes full of some implication she doesn't understand. 

“And in this age," Amora adds, "the personhood goes to the princess, and the witch is nothing but an evil shadow. Is it worth it then, to have had that agency, only to lose it now, rather than suffer so many years? I wish I knew the answer, Frigg-son. How I wish I knew."

* * *

She is not the only one who leaves from Vanaheim to join Odin's court. Then, she is young, and not bitter at all, because it feels like a rise above her station in a way other things cannot. And there, she is beloved, because she gives the gift of life itself, of youth and power, the strength that lets the Aesir rise so high. 

It is later that she regrets it all, later that she wishes to be home. She wonders how many others do the same, for as beloved as she may be, she is still Vana.

Asgard is wood, and brick and stone, and metal. It is manufactured. Even in her garden, she finds the traces everywhere, not like her childhood home, not wild and free. The city is a stronghold, to keep the world out, and for her, it is a cage.

Maybe that's why she leaves, the deciever pulling her in to the darkness.

Maybe that's why she trusts that self-same god of lies to pulls her out again, and why she offers nothing but defense to the most damning of statements. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

* * *

A necklace, a whisper, a flicker of a flame.

It is Odin's fault, in the end.

* * *

There will never be another Ragnarok, and it almost seems bittersweet. They shall live forever, now, but the things that were always shall be. Perhaps their future is open, and the future is all that matters, but anything so solid seems regrettable.

"If I wanted to change my story," Amora asks, "how would I do it?"

"You cannot," Loki replies.

She asks him why, a hundred times, in their brief interactions. Loki spends time on the Midgard that is not Midgard, as if despite their open arms Asgard is still forbidden. Spends time with the mortal girl, the one who's story he saved, and as such brought back all that she had cared about, a beautiful disaster of a gift.

"Because," comes the reply, eventually, a year and a day, "you are not a god, the way they are. You have no story at the center of your being."

"Am I not as of Asgard as the rest?" she questions, wild gestures, frantic, afraid. "Did not you save my story, as you saved theirs? Answer me, Lie-Smith!"

"I don't tell lies," Loki corrects, "only stories. Here's one, I think you ought to hear. Once upon a time, there was a god, of beauty and of youth, who looked at the story she had been given and cast it out, cursing Asgard and all who lived in it."

She stares, wild eyed, uncertain if she's hungry for an answer to a question she's been missing her whole life, or frightened of a truth that breaks the lie that is her very nature.

"Would you know more?"

* * *

The world falls in to winter. Endless, blistering. She sits in the hall, by the hearth, and all she can think of is ice, a frozen heart, a frozen life. 

Thiazi's daughter wreaks the end of the world upon them, with sadness and with rage. Asgard weakens, for all the world does fall to ice and snow and death, and even in warm halls do the cold winds nip at them, not full blocked by the walls.

Odin, wrapped in furs, his single eye cold. "I hate that daughter of the Frost," he curses, bitter words. "I have hated her since before I knew, since first we met, and ever has she been treacherous."

She stands to the side, as she does, as she always does, for her opinion does not matter here.

When does it ever?

Blood, spilt, in her name, no, spilt for Odin's petty vengeance against those who don't dare give him everything that he desires, tenfold strong.

Who knows how much of it she planned, was planned with her as but a pawn, or maybe, for the first time, there was no plan at all. 

A necklace, a flicker, a whisper of the flame.

She curses all of Asgard, brings Hel itself down on their heels, and as the ashes clear and they are reborn, she's been cast out of the story.

* * *

The golden apples only fall to Idunn, and she alone may give them out, to those that she deems worthy. The Idunn who is Idunn forever more, she is more loyal to Asgard and its people than the now-Amora ever had, ever could be. Perhaps their stories are the same, but the heart of them change, as always it must.

She wonders if, the first time round, if she had scryed the past, she would regret the curse, the change, the impulsive vengeance against the sins that bound her.

* * *

"I like you less, like this," Amora says. "I do not think I can ever like you, little god of stories."

Loki shrugs. "I don't think that he'd be glad, that you stayed loyal while all Asgard came to love me."

"Not him," she tells him. "The you that used to be, a death ago. All-mother's servant, shining hero. Where Asgard may prefer you as you are, I think I liked you then."

"I'm still the same," Loki says. 

"Are you?" Amora asks. 

"You aren't the only one." She supposes it's the mortal girl, or perhaps her sister Lorelei, because Asgard cared not for the Loki that came before, only for the Loki now. They have a thing for usefulness. 

* * *

If she scryed all of her pasts, she could get an answer. Did I make the right choice? Am I happier, this way? Perhaps, that is even more dangerous a fate than being lost in the pasts, because there is an infinity more of what-ifs to find yourself fallen in to. 

She's tempted, setting up the ritual, in a spring on the Midgard that is not Midgard, but which she is starting to see as such. But the past is the past, the present the present, and only the future matters. There is no use, in wondering if this choice was the best. No more use than dwelling on failed plots. 

The last Ragnarok is the hardest, she thinks, because after it, you don't know what to do.

She lies in the grasses of Vanaheim, of her childhood home, long abandoned, and stares up at the sky. 

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by Thor: Ages of Thunder and Thor: Reign of Blood's backstory for the enchantress, specifically that several ragnaroks ago, she used to be Idunn, but since has been replaced (by a goddess i think matches up with Freyja). also, the endless fascination with how Amora, one of Asgard's constant enemies, still hangs out in Asgard a lot, and fights beside them frequently. 
> 
> there's something i find deeply satisfying about taking a female villain from mythology and changing the story around.


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